


tightlacing

by blacksatinpointeshoes



Series: jon sims v the nhs [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (and there is comfort), (im kidding but am I?), Angst and Humor, Autistic Jon Sims, Gen, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Jon Sims Terrifies The Entire NHS, Medical Inaccuracies, Melanie King Has the Brain Cell, Melanie is the Designated Sayer of Fuck, Post MAG 131, Spoilers for MAG 131, Touch-Starved, Your Actions Have Consequences Jonathan!!!!!!!!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-22
Updated: 2019-03-22
Packaged: 2019-11-28 03:56:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18203201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blacksatinpointeshoes/pseuds/blacksatinpointeshoes
Summary: A comprehensive essay about why someone (not to name any names,Jon) should leave all their bones in place.or, the one that should be titled'when will you LEARN!!! that your ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES!!!!!!!!'





	tightlacing

**Author's Note:**

> fun note about the title! it refers to that super unhealthy practice of using a corset to fuck up one's ribs, because my bone puns weren't working. all the same I thought this was a good alternative.
> 
> thank you to that one Tumblr post I reblogged that mentioned the word 'pneumothorax.' you're so much of the reason this exists. 
> 
> and on that note - enjoy!

Basira’s cot smells like her. This isn’t a surprise, of course, but it’s the only thing on which Jon’s one-track mind can focus as Melanie leads him towards it by the arm and pushes him onto the bed. For a while he just sits blankly, clutching his own rib in one tight fist and staring at the dull grey wall across from him. Melanie comes back and tries to take the rib away, and  _ that  _ wakes Jon right up. 

_ “No,”  _ he rasps, tucking it under Basira’s pillow with mechanical accuracy. That’s where it has to go. It’s not safe otherwise. Melanie falters right away, and Jon doesn’t even have the energy to feel guilty about why that is. 

“Sure,” she says, backing off and making for the basement hallway. “Just… get some sleep, Jon.” 

He doesn’t respond. There is an absence inside him, and it hurts to move. The action of lying down is too much for the gaping emptiness, like throwing a string across Niagara Falls and hoping it reaches the other side. Maybe, if he stays as still as possible, Jon thinks, he will be numb enough to sleep. 

Basira’s cot smells like her, gentle and all-consuming. It’s subtly floral, with hints of men’s deodorant and lavender shampoo. It smells like the hug Jon might’ve gotten had he woken up human. He tries not to think about how everyone avoids touching him lately. He actually can’t think much at all. 

Jon doesn’t fall asleep so much as pass out again, the pain in his chest eventually overtaking all and any rational thought until he descends into blessed, devouring black. 

Then he dreams. Of course he dreams. He dreams of bones being ripped one at a time from his supplicant flesh, squirming out of his body like they’d been waiting for an excuse to flee. At first the operation leaves no mark but then the Boneturner gets sloppy, and Jon is left agonised. Jared Hopworth is gasping, greedy, and drunk with power, digging his nails through the meat of Jon’s arm and wrenching bone from tendon, nerve from sinew, muscle from fat. Jared flays open Jon’s skin with dirty hands and leaves behind streaks of grime and gore. He bleeds and bleeds and bleeds. Jon is Regan, and she has good bones. 

Jon screams himself hoarse and Jared doesn’t care. 

Next he dreams of Daisy. He dreams of entering the coffin and holding his rib like a torch in front of him. He dreams that Daisy springs at him, violent, furious, screaming about guilt and blame and stupidity. He dreams that Daisy presses his own bone to his throat, her lips drawn back in a snarl, and she roars at him, just like the last time she tried to kill him: “You brought a recorder, eh? Then we’ll go through the voice box.” 

Jon dreams he tries to explain, frantic, that he is down in the coffin to save her, but Daisy’s eyes have already fixated on the bone. “You brought the body, eh?” she spits, and Jon doesn’t understand. “Then we’ll go through the heart.” 

Jon dreams that he stammers out a hundred protests, one hundred apologies, one hundred rationalisations, but Daisy doesn’t care. She merely angles the rib towards his chest and smiles as an ache blooms there. The hurt bleeds outwards and Jon chokes on it, barely able to ask, “What happened in the coffin?” because he has to know. 

He _ is _ going to die. He’s certain of that. But he has to get Daisy’s statement first. The death of the new Archivist is unplanned for, certainly, but Jon is expendable. The statement will not be so easily extracted by a fumbling replacement. The Archivist knows this, and so he asks. 

Jon dreams that Daisy lowers the bone. “I’m still going to kill you,” she says, but her words sound watery and faraway. She is compelled.

Jon dreams that he is going to die. He thinks about it as he speaks those ritual words to mark Daisy’s statement. He knows he is going to die, but he cannot die without knowledge. He cannot die ignorant. He cannot die unknowing. He cannot die in the Unknowing. 

No. 

No, that was Tim. 

Jon dreams that Daisy plunges the bone back into his ribcage and his overworked heart bursts into pieces in spurts of eager gore. Jon dreams that he can hear it slap against his lungs. Jon dreams that he can hear his heart explode. 

Jon dreams that he can hear Tim saying, “I don’t forgive you,” as he dies. It hurts his chest. The building explodes, and the persistent ringing in Jon’s ears translates to the cavity in his lungs. It is constant and aching and whining. Tim says, “I don’t forgive you,” and then the world is obliterated. 

Behind his eyelids, though, Jon can see another image of Tim, one from a happier time. Tim had just returned from his yearly holiday, his brown skin tanned deeper from the hours he’d spent kayaking with friends. To this Tim, Jon makes an offhand remark before sitting down beside him, asking about research and ribbing him just a bit. It’s enough for Tim to laugh, full-throated, and flip Jon the bird, still grinning as he does so. Tim always liked Jon’s sense of humour, even when it was bad. Especially when it was bad.

It’s the memory of this Tim, five-years-ago-Tim, who smiled, that makes Jon wake up with tears on his cheeks. He realises he is lying down, and that someone has put Basira’s blanket over him. It still smells like her. 

Jon’s breaths are shallow and short; this is the typical gasp of awakening that he’s yet to become accustomed to after two years of nightmares. He’s lightheaded. Disoriented. Tim’s smile flashes in his mind. His thoughts are choppy, and his exhale is a rattle. The dull ache of his dreams has followed him into waking, and - what is - what’s - why can’t he breathe?

Throwing the quilt off of his legs, Jon stands up and tries to get his bearings. He’s okay. He  _ thinks  _ he’s okay. He’s on two steady legs and his mind feels alright. So why can’t he breathe? He’s  _ fine.  _ He feels mostly normal. And he’s not having a panic attack, despite everything, so why the hell can’t he breathe? 

Then Jon twists just a bit to pick up the blanket again, and he nearly blacks out. The pain in his chest, formerly low-level, has turned into a stabbing weight, like the Admiral if the damn cat had a knife for an arse. Still gasping for air, Jon makes his decision before he can regret it, snatching up his glasses from where they haphazardly lay on the cot. 

“Melanie?” he calls as he opens the door to Basira’s little room, hoping that she doesn’t catch the rather desperate edge to his voice. “Melanie, I -” Jon breaks off to cough into his elbow, wincing, then adjusts his volume as he comes upon her cot. 

Knowledge starts to pour out of a dam Jon can no longer keep closed, and he squeezes his eyes shut to fight it back. There are too many words that rush at him, trying to fix him, trying to tell him what’s wrong. Jon suddenly knows too many complex concepts for comfort, most importantly that the oxygen level in his blood is dropping, and that his lungs are deflating helium balloons. The ocean wants to tell him more but Jon blinks  _ hard,  _ and the rush of learning in his ears goes quiet.

“Melanie,” he croaks, bending down to shake her awake. It takes a while but Jon manages it - there’s nothing wrong with his hands, after all; Melanie is just a deep sleeper. 

“Wh -  _ Jon?”  _ she mumbles groggily as he straightens, rubbing sleep out of her eyes. “What the hell is going on?”

“I-I need to… I need to go to the hospital,” Jon rasps, and then his body gives up. 

* * *

Jon comes to in an ambulance, and notes with no small amount of annoyance that this is the second time he’s collapsed in one day. An oxygen mask uncomfortably sheaths his mouth and nose, and all his senses return in full force. The bustle of the car is nearly too much to process.

Knowledge drains into Jon’s mind again, pooling in the back of his skull and spilling over the top of his forehead; it rises in his lungs and spurts out of drowned lips. It’s all much too fast but Jon keeps up, somehow, synapses firing quicker and quicker and filling him with awful, unwanted knowledge. He processes data faster than he can realise he’s doing it. 

There are people speaking in hushed tones around him and beeping comes from every direction. The ambulance’s sirens wail as it hurtles through the city streets, and emergency workers hurry back and forth, squeezing around the stretcher on which Jon lays, trying their best to keep him steady. 

Jon rips off the oxygen mask and ignores the horrified cries of EMTs around him, coughing as he blinks away the flood. He cannot control the tide for long, and he can already feel himself starting to sink. The word comes to him before he can understand:  _ “Pneumothorax,”  _ he whispers, and one of the ambulance workers rushes to his side.

“Sir, I understand this is disorienting and confusing,” the first responder says, snatching up the oxygen mask before it can hit the ground and sitting down beside Jon, “but-”

“Pneumothorax,” Jon gasps again, already feeling light-headed again. “B-both sides, I-”

“We’re working on a diagnosis now, don’t worry,” the first responder continues with the calm of a hurricane’s eye. “I’m going to have to put this back on, so you can breathe-”

“It’s a pneumothorax,” Jon insists, strained, stifling the coughs so he can just get his goddamn point across, “both sides, I-I-I  _ told  _ you, I-”

“Sir, you were incredibly oxygen deprived when the ambulance came, and your levels still aren’t -”

“Yes, I know!” Jon snaps, coughs scraping against the back of his throat with more vigour than before. “That’s why I — I - I - well, I know what’s wrong with me.” He takes a deep breath that doesn’t reach, but keeps talking anyway. “Double pneumothorax. I-”

“Sir-”

“-and I’ve got all the right risk factors on top of the  _ symptoms,  _ obviously, I— I smoke, I’m - and I’ve just - I—”

“He had blunt force chest trauma earlier today,” Melanie cuts in from a nearby bench, and Jon has never been so happy to hear her voice. He was a little bit afraid of explaining… whatever the hell his encounter with Jared Hopworth has been.

The EMT worker looks between them and sighs. “I’m going to put the oxygen mask back on. Ma’am, can you come with me?”

“Gladly,” says Melanie, shooting Jon a look he can’t understand. All the same, she gets up to follow the first responder, and Jon tries his best to breathe. 

The rest of the ambulance ride is uneventful. The din of sirens becomes a static, constant drone in the background, and Jon fades into the uncomfortable realm between waking and sleeping. His mind is filled with images of Tim and Sasha, their faces screwed up in determination as they stand beside him. All three of them are pushing on a rusting metal door, leaking water, and trying their best to keep it closed. 

* * *

Jon’s next argument with a medical professional involves Melanie and anaesthetic, the irony of which does not go unnoticed. “She can’t be in the room,” the doctor says, barring Melanie in the doorway. “It’s family only.”

“I’m his sister,” Melanie blurts, catching Jon’s eye in her peripheral vision and begging him to go along with it. He tries to say ‘yes’ with just his expression, but Jon has never been good with eye contact. 

The doctor looks to Jon and back, clearly about to comment on the fact that Jon is four or five shades darker than Melanie and almost two heads taller. “Ma’am, I -” 

“He’s adopted.”

There’s a short moment of awkward silence where the only sound is that of the respirator. “Can I see some ID?” the doctor asks finally, and Melanie’s face screws up like an angry teenager.

_ “ID?”  _ she snaps, taking one dangerous step forward. It would be threatening if she weren’t so short. “We were just in an ambulance! Listen, I didn’t run out of the house, frantic because my brother wasn’t  _ breathing,  _ and think ‘maybe I should get my ID because some doctor is going to want proof of—”

“I understand,” the woman interrupts, and Melanie deflates thankfully. “Either way, you may not want to be in the room if he requires surgery.” She sits down near Jon’s bed. “It looks like your… brother may be right about what he said in the ambulance. We suspect that it is indeed a pneumothorax - a  _ double  _ pneumothorax, no less - that’s a collapsed lung,” she clarifies at Melanie’s blank expression. “We’ll run some x-rays, then hopefully put in a breathing tube. While I’m sure you’re feeling some discomfort, the situation is far from immediately dangerous. Sounds good?”

Melanie and Jon look at each other, and they’re thinking the same thing. 

“Um,” says Melanie, clearing her throat. “Is it… is it safe to perform x-rays on someone who’s just gone through blunt force trauma? I-”

“Perfectly safe,” the doctor reassures her, and Melanie falters. An awkward pause blankets the room again. 

Jon looks to Melanie, who looks to Jon, and they both look back at the doctor. “Great,” says Melanie, visibly uncomfortable. 

“Great!” says the doctor. “Afterwards, we’ll get you situated with some general anaesthetic, and you can sleep through the rest of the-”

“N-no,” Jon rasps, speaking up for the first time since they’ve entered the hospital. “No, I— I can’t do the anaesthetic, I… I’m not going to. I can’t. Please don’t put me under.” 

The doctor frowns, looking over Jon’s file. “Mr Sims, I have to advise you that the general anaesthetic is your best option-”

“I’m not going back to sleep,” says Jon firmly, his last words rattling as he forms them. “I — I don’t mind that there’s no local available, just… just put in the tube. I’ll be fine.” 

The doctor blinks in confusion for a moment and Melanie’s heart lurches. Why the  _ hell  _ does Jon’s stupid spooky Beholding power kick in at all the worst moments? “Can I talk to him alone?” she asks hastily, bargaining away her last chip. “While you, er — ready the x-rays or something.” 

The doctor nods. “Of course. I’ll be back in a moment,” she says, and leaves. 

Melanie drags up a chair and sits down next to the hospital bed, struck by how familiar a feeling this is. She’s about to scold Jon, to remind him that this is not the Institute and therefore blurting out information he shouldn’t know won’t be tolerated, but then she  _ looks _ at him. He’s staring after the doctor, his expression a frozen mask of guilty horror. 

“I don’t — I don’t  _ want  _ to know,” he tries to begin, his voice wavering far too much for Melanie’s comfort. “It just - it just happens, and I can’t stop it, and-”

“I’m not blaming you, Jon,” Melanie says, and she speaks she realises it’s true. “Not for this, anyway. I mean - I took out an army of bones and meat with a knife. You know things. That’s just life, I guess.” She fiddles with a stray thread on the cuff of her sleeve, squinting down at it as she shrugs. “It might suck, but it’s what we got.”

From beside her, Jon takes a breath that catches in his throat and - so softly that Melanie can barely hear it, so softly that she almost thinks she’s imagining it - says, “I— I’m scared, Melanie.” 

That hangs in the air for a moment, weighty and low like a cloud of morning fog. Melanie glances proper at Jon’s face and sees his eyes shining behind his glasses, and she realises with a jolt that this is not just an admission of vulnerability, it’s a declaration of trust. And she doesn’t need some stupid fear entity to tell her that. 

Melanie grabs Jon’s hand and squeezes hard, because she doesn’t have the ability to save him with false platitudes. All she has is contact. Jon tenses up at first but when Melanie doesn’t let go it quickly becomes clear what she’s doing. For the first time in what feels like years, someone is touching Jon, and they’re not trying to kill him.

He squeezes back.

“I’m scared too, y’know,” Melanie says, grinning. She swallows away all the seriousness of the night; she tamps down her questions about why he declined the anaesthetic or his perfect self-diagnosis. She knows the answers anyway. It’s not like the other members of the Institute staff are ignorant of Jon’s nightmares. 

Jon’s thumb ghosts nervously over Melanie’s knuckles as if surprised that they haven’t met his cheek yet, and looks up. “Oh?”

Melanie bites the inside of her cheek. “I’m scared of what the hell that doctor’s going to think when the x-ray results come back,” she cackles, unable to stop the laughter from rising in her chest. “I mean, your  _ ribs,  _ Jon! What the fuck were you  _ thinking?”  _

“Shut up,” Jon mumbles, his ears a very faint pink. “I— I had  _ reasons-” _

“And you broke your  _ entire  _ body down three hours later,” Melanie continues, words interrupted with bubbling giggles. “I mean - Jon, you’re a very smart man, but -”

“Stop,” Jon says, turning scarlet. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I—I did what I had to. And the doctor’s coming in now, so-”

“I just mean this’ll be interesting,” Melanie snickers as the door opens, and she’s still not finished laughing.

“Melanie.”

“Okay!” She puts up one hand in surrender, the other still in Jon’s scarred palm. “Okay, fine.” That very nearly would’ve been the end of it, but as Melanie’s laughter spirals into nothing, she notices he’s smiling, too. It’s a good smile: private and joking and warm and kind.

Melanie realises with a jolt, as the doctor returns to discuss treatment, that tonight is the first time she’s ever seen it. 

**Author's Note:**

> thank you deeply for reading! if you've enjoyed, please feel free to hit up my Tumblr @thoughtsbubble. I'm always down for a conversation about magnus! 
> 
> comments and kudos are, as always, very deeply appreciated. :)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] tightlacing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21091775) by [GoLBPodfics (GodOfLaundryBaskets)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GodOfLaundryBaskets/pseuds/GoLBPodfics)




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